MakeCode Arcade Valentine’s Update
Posted on February 9th, 2022 by Jaqster
Love is in the air! But instead of a box of chocolates, we’ve got something better for you… updates for MakeCode Arcade and a Valentine’s Day tutorial! 💖
Here’s a run-down of the updates:
Workspace Search
If you have a large program, it can be time consuming scrolling around, looking for that function or variable on your workspace. We’ve added the ability to search for blocks on your workspace by pressing Ctrl + f or right-clicking to open the context menu and selecting Find.
While we’re talking about navigating the workspace, just a reminder of a cool feature we shipped a while ago that allows you to navigate to your function definitions. This is useful in large programs with lots of function calls – simply right-click on your function call and select “Go To Definition” to navigate to the associated function definition.
Skillmap Accessibility Improvements
We’re continually working to make MakeCode more accessible to anyone who wants to learn to code. We’ve added keyboard navigation and high contrast modes to the Skillmap for low or vision-impaired users.
Image Editor Scaling
A much requested feature! Now it’s possible to scale the size of your image. Simply use the Marquee tool to select your image and drag the corners to resize.
Programmatic Scaling
Resizing is a theme with this release! We’ve also added some new blocks in the Sprite category that will let you programmatically resize or scale your sprites.
For more information on how to use these blocks, see the reference documentation:
https://arcade.makecode.com/reference/sprites/sprite/change-scale and
https://arcade.makecode.com/reference/sprites/sprite/set-scale
There’s also an extension available for more advanced scaling operations.
Valentine’s Day Tutorial
If you would like to practice using these new scaling blocks, try this fun Valentine’s Day Tutorial where your grey heart tries to capture red hearts to grow its size, and avoid the arrows which will shrink it down.
New Destroy Sprite block
Also something that many folks have been asking for – this block allows you to destroy all sprites of a certain kind in your game. Before, you had to use a loop with the array of sprites of kind block – this makes it much easier!
New Tilemap blocks
We’ve made some changes to the organization and the order of blocks in the Scene category that will hopefully make it easier to find things. And we’ve also made some small changes to the Tilemap API and added some useful new blocks
We created a separate tilemap block to make it easier to use multiple different tilemaps in a game.
We also added a few new tilemap blocks under the Locations sub-category:
Tilemap Location of Sprite – returns the location on a tilemap where a specified sprite is.
Location property – returns different properties of a tilemap location. For example, this can be helpful for translating tilemap columns/rows to screen coordinates (x/y).
Tile at Location is wall – this returns a Boolean (true/false) value if the tile at the specified location is a wall.
Tilemap Location left/right/top/bottom of Location – this returns the tilemap location that is adjacent to another location.
Tile Image at Location – this returns the image of a tile at a specified location.
Image Editor improvements
We’ve also made a few minor improvements to the image editors for improved usability.
- In the Tilemap Editor, clicking on the Wall tool button will allow you to select and deselect.
- For advanced users, there are some handy keyboard shortcuts you can use to do some cool things like:
- Replace color/tile: shift + r
- Outline image (image editor only): shift + 1-9 or shift + a-f (e.g., shift + 3 outlines with color number 3 in the palette)
More documentation on keyboard shortcuts is posted here https://makecode.com/asset-editor-shortcuts
Skillmap Reset Code
Based on user feedback, we changed the way you can reset code between Skillmap tutorials. For any tutorials that build upon previous ones, we’ve added a “Replace my code” option in the first step that will allow students to reset the code in the workspace. Note that this will delete any existing code, so use sparingly – only when students want a fresh start with template code.
As always, if you find any issues, or have suggestions for improvements, please log them on GitHub.
If you have questions, feedback, or would like to participate in the MakeCode community, please join the Forum or follow us on social @MSMakeCode.
Made with ❤️ in Microsoft MakeCode Arcade.
– The MakeCode Team